Stepping Out with My Baby

By JAY COCKS

Saturday afternoon shopping. He: bored, marginally encouraging, somewhat resentful. She: revved-up, politely incorrigible, playfully indecisive.

She appears from the dressing area sporting some loose-limbed Kenzo tunic or, perhaps, a Calvin Klein dress that might, with the single addition of a center support pole, provide all-weather protection on an overnight hike.

She: a glance in the mirror, an adjustment, then a look around. He: meets her look, then his limit. Enough. The proceedings must conclude. He searches for something cool and dismissive, settles on an old favorite. "Come on," he says, perhaps even loud enough for the sales staff to hear. "That thing makes you look pregnant."

That familiar, glancing putdown may say a good deal about conventional--perhaps stereotypical--male attitudes toward pregnancy, but it also includes volumes of hand-me-down ideas about the traditional maternal look. To look pregnant is to look bowed in the middle, practically bulbous; to be pregnant is open physical defiance of prevailing fashion form. The usual course around these dire sartorial straits has been to sail into great billowing garments of soft prints that try to exalt maternity by sentimentalizing it. The expectant mother, shrouded in a calf-tickling Laura Ashley fantasy, becomes a late-Victorian artifact, like a sprite from a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. A woman who wanted a certain modernity of fashion to complement a contemporary pregnancy, who wanted to be comfortable with her appearance and her condition, pretty much had to improvise, scrounge or raid her husband's wardrobe.

Until now. If it is chic to be pregnant, it is not necessarily chic to look like a helium-inflated polyester balloon. It is no longer necessary, either. Fashion, like Big Business generally, has had to make its own adjustments to maternity. And where fashion has not provided, fashion has been ignored. The racks still hold their share of flapping, color-blind muumuus that--depending on the relative age and condition of the wearer--proclaim either an imminent arrival, an imperative diet or a Tupperware cookout after sundown. Increasingly, though, women are working at their careers until very near delivery, and they need clothes to get the job done. "It seems as if every female lawyer in Washington was pregnant last year," says Billie Fischer, owner of three stores in the Lady Madonna chain, which grossed nearly $20 million in 1981. "You don't want to appear in front of a judge in buttons and bows. They want tailored dresses, skirts and jackets with silk blouses."

Fischer's stores provide all those components, along with such trendy items as knickers and--for the summer--miniskirts. (A caution to the intrepid: there is as yet no hard and fast policy about this, but it is strongly recommended that--except at a punk surprise party--minis never be worn with support stockings.) Says Marilyn Lane of Washington's New Conceptions maternity boutique, "Whatever fashion is In for the everyday woman is what the pregnant woman wants to wear."

This can mean anything from a zebra-striped bathing suit and chino walking shorts to a slinky, maroon silk one-shoulder gown and a black crepe cocktail dress. Davida Levy of Miami's Main Event even sells something called the "executive dress," which may be worn with a jacket and a reversible vest for an approximation of the three-piece look. Since maternity customers are often older, with jobs of their own and a certain amount of flexible income, they can manage triple-figure price tags with a minimum of fuss. Indeed, retail prices of maternity clothes have more than doubled in the past three years in great part because, as Lillian Tomek of Bloomingdale's says, "women demand the same kind of quality that they have been wearing. Maternity was always budget. Ten years ago, you couldn't get anything but polyester. Today women want natural fabrics."

That may be the trend, but the major share of the estimated annual $200 million to $250 million maternity-clothes market is still absorbed by those dread synthetics, which are usually cheaper and almost always require less maintenance. Blends bloom even at Bloomie's, to the surprise and chagrin of one Manhattan attorney who exclaimed, "Everything looks terrible. It's all polyester. I can't wear that to the office." Says Jacqueline McCord Leo, 35, author of The New Woman 's Guide to Getting Married: "You can't get silk. You can't get V-necked sweaters or dresses. I can't tell you how disappointed I am that everything is polyester."

Fabric purists, and women whose jobs permit a casual approach, can do a little vamping and pull on a pair of high-fashion Norma Kamali sweat pants; or buy something oversized from the designer boutique section; or dip into the proud father's closet and come up with some huge smothering sweater that, worn with pants and leg warmers, makes any mother-to-be look like an off-center ballerina on her way home from class.

Maternity pants, it must be admitted, remain a problem. Most of them have an elastic belly that looks like some weird kind of mutant marsupial pouch; even size 48s and a set of suspenders would be preferable. No haute couture designer has come up with an adequate solution to this challenge in aesthetic engineering, in part, because no designer--with the exception of Givenchy--seems especially interested in doing a special maternity line. Most, like Perry Ellis, are delighted to have their clothes adapted for maternity, but they show no inclination to dabble in the market.

The widely accepted reason for this is that--thriving though it may be--the maternity market is small change. It may also be that the lovely line of a pregnant woman's body is susceptible only to the dictates of nature, not of a designer whose clothes shape--indeed, insist upon--a configuration of his own imagining. "Designers have never paid much attention to maternity clothes because pregnancy is such a temporary state," Norma Kamali remarks. It may be because maternity clothes do have their own afterlife that designers, who depend on variety, fight shy of them. Younger women, once they have delivered, will fold their wardrobes carefully for another year, another child. Older women may pass along their clothes to a friend, and they are no longer just garments then, but talismans, gentle reassurances. In this sharing there is a reaffirmation of community and a kind of unspoken communion that fashion would never encourage and could never, ever touch.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Denise Worrell/New York

With reporting by Denise Worrell/New York

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